Watched early as a Monday Mystery movie/Screen Unseen.

The Legend of Ochi is a PG rated A24 creature feature… I know, the world turned upside down. What even is life? It’s kind of their quirky quirk quirk version of Mac & Me… or to be less cynical: E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. Or maybe not. Whatever it is, it’s depressingly predictable.

It’s set on an island where humans live uneasily with a mountain tribe of… Big Orange Feet? Orange big foots? Ochi. Definitely Ochi. When a teen girl stumbles on a wounded baby creature, she takes it home and makes cutesy wootsie friends with it. But the townsfolk won’t like it so she escapes with it back into the woods.

The creatures look like what would happen if an orangutan mated with Stitch and gave birth to Orange Baby Yoda. A little too manufactured cute for my cynical take. Released in time for Christmas designs. But that explains the whole movie… it’s just Quirky with a capital Q and a trademark symbol. They are trying too hard to be weird in a story that contains backstory we have to puzzle out ourselves.

The film was just journeying down a too familiar path with the little girl and the baby Ochi. Replace orange primate with any given alien, big foot, or genetically modified pig and you’d eventually stumble on this film. It’s doing nothing beyond letting Willem Dafoe wear very silly armor as it tells its “maybe they aren’t evil” plot that you’ve seen before.

I’m not totally trashing the movie since there are uplifting moments at the end… utterly manufactured ones, but still pretty good. And with all my complaints about quirk, at least I raised an eyebrow and chuckled a few times.

But I was mainly curious descending into boredom by this overly familiar plot and overly crafted creatures. The CGI was good, at least. And Willem Dafoe is apparently contractually obligated to be in every A24 film and that’s usually a net positive.

Score: 70